Why This Matters
The introduction of JSIR marks a significant advancement in JavaScript tooling by providing a high-level intermediate representation that supports detailed control flow and dataflow analysis. Developed by Google and open-sourced, JSIR enables more sophisticated code analysis and transformations, aligning JavaScript with industry trends of language-specific IRs seen in other languages like Rust and Swift. This development promises to enhance optimization, transpilation, and bundling processes, ultimately benefiting both developers and end-users through more efficient and reliable JavaScript applications.
Key Takeaways
- JSIR offers a high-fidelity, high-level IR for JavaScript, supporting detailed control flow and dataflow analysis.
- It enables advanced source-to-source transformations like transpilation, optimization, and bundling.
- The IR is open source and used in production at Google, aligning JavaScript tooling with industry trends for language-specific IRs.
This RFC introduces JSIR, a high-level IR for JavaScript:
JSIR preserves all information from the AST and supports high-fidelity round-trip between source ↔ AST ↔ JSIR;
JSIR uses MLIR regions to represent control flow structures;
JSIR supports dataflow analysis.
JSIR is developed and deployed in production at Google for code analysis and transform use cases.
JSIR is open source here: GitHub - google/jsir: Next-generation JavaScript analysis tooling · GitHub.
Motivation
Industry trend of building high-level language-specific IRs
The compiler industry is moving towards building high-level language-specific IRs. For example, the Rust and Swift compilers perform certain analyses on their high-level IRs before lowering down to LLVM. There are also a number of ongoing projects in this direction, such as Clang IR, Mojo, and Carbon.
The need for a high-level JavaScript IR
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